Beach Read

I LAY BACK ON the floor and stared up at the stars. Fluffy, dark clouds were drifting across the sky, blotting them out bit by bit, and I was watching them like a countdown, though to what I didn’t know. The letters lay in a heap around me, all unfolded, all read. Two hours hadn’t given me closure, but it was time I’d never expected to have with him. Words he hadn’t said to me finally spoken. I felt like I had time traveled.

I was a wound, half-healed-over and scraped raw again. “Everybody Hurts” was running through my mind. I could see the consolation of it, the idea that your pain wasn’t unique.

Something about that made it seem both bigger and smaller. Smaller because all the world was aching. Bigger because I could finally admit that every other feeling I’d been focusing on had been a distraction from the deepest hurt.

My father was gone. And I would always miss him.

And that had to be okay.

I reached for my phone and opened the YouTube app. I typed “Everybody Hurts” and I played it there, from my phone speakers. When it ended, I started it over.

The pain settled into a deep rhythm. It felt almost like exercising, a mounting burn through my muscles and joints. Once, in a bad season of tension headaches, my doctor had told me that pain was our body demanding to be heard.

“Sometimes it’s a warning,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a billboard.”

I didn’t know what this pain’s intent was but I thought, If I listen to it, maybe it will be content to close back up for a while.

Maybe this night of pain would give me even a day of relief.

The song ended again. I started it over.

The night was cold. I wondered how much colder it would be in January. I wanted to see it. If I did, I thought, that would be one more part of him I could meet.

I gathered the letters and envelopes into a neat stack and stood to go home, but now when I pictured the house on the edge of the lake, a strange new variation of that searing ache—Gus, in D minor, I thought—passed through me.

I felt like I was coming apart, like the connective tissue between my left and right ribs had been hacked away and I was going to split.

It had been hours now since we’d parted. I’d gotten no call, not even a text. I thought about the look on his face when he’d seen Naomi, like a ghost was standing in front of his eyes. A tiny, beautiful ghost he had once loved so madly he’d married her. So madly he wanted to work through it when she tore his heart to pieces.

I started to cry again, so hard I couldn’t see.

I opened my texts with Shadi and typed: I need you.

It was seconds before she answered: First train out.

I stared at my phone for a second longer. There was only one other person I really wanted to talk to now. I tapped the contact info and held the phone to my ear.

It was the middle of the night. I didn’t expect an answer, but on the second ring, the line clicked on.

“Janie?” Mom whispered in a rush. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I squeaked.

“Tell me, honey,” she urged. I could hear her sitting up, the rustle of sheets drawing back and the faint click of her bedside lamp turning on. “I’m here now, honey. Just tell me everything.”

My voice wrenched upward as I started at the beginning. “Did I tell you Jacques broke up with me in a hot tub?”

Mom gasped. “That little shit-weasel!”

And then I told her the rest. I told her everything.

SHADI ARRIVED AT ten AM with a duffel bag an NBA player could’ve slept comfortably in and a box of fresh produce. When I opened the door to find her on the sunlit porch, I leaned first to see into the cardboard box and asked, “No booze?”

“Did you know you have an amazing farmer’s market two blocks from here?” she said, whisking inside. “And that the only Uber driver seems to be legally blind?”

I tried to laugh, but just the sight of her here had tears welling up behind my eyes. “Oh, honey,” Shadi said, and set the box down on the couch before enveloping me in a hug that was all rose water and coconut oil. “I’m so sorry,” she said, her hand toying in my hair in a gentle, motherly way.

She pulled back and gripped my arms, examining me. “The good news is,” she said softly, “your skin looks like a newborn baby’s. What have you been eating out here?”

I tipped my head toward the box of squash and greenery. “None of that.”

“Drafting diet?” she hazarded, and when I nodded, she patted my arm and turned toward the kitchen, gathering the box in her arms as she went. “I figured as much. Before the booze and the crying, you need a vegetable. And probably, like, eggs or something.” She stopped short as she reached the kitchen, gasping either at size, scope, and style or at the disgusting mess I’d managed to make of it. “Okayyyy,” she said, regrouping as she began to unload the veggies on the lone spare bit of countertop. “How about you change out of those pants, and I’ll start on brunch.”

“What’s wrong with these pants?” I gestured to my sweats. “These are my official uniform now, on account of I’ve officially given up.”

Shadi rolled her eyes and drummed her blue nails on the counter. “Honestly, Janie, it doesn’t have to be a ball gown, but I will not cook for you until you put on pants that involve a button or zipper.”

My stomach grumbled then, as if pleading with me, and I turned back to the first-floor bedroom. There were a handful of wrinkled T-shirts Gus had discarded in the past couple of weeks on the floor, never to be picked up again, and I kicked them into a pile behind the closet door where I wouldn’t have to look at them, then dressed in cutoffs and an Ella Fitzgerald T-shirt.

Making brunch was an hour-and-a-half-long affair, and then there was the fact that Shadi insisted we finish all the dishes before we took a bite. “Look at this stack,” I reasoned with her, gesturing at the leaning pile of cereal-crusted bowls. “It could be Christmas by the time we’ve gotten through all of these.”

“Then I’m glad I packed a coat,” Shadi replied with a casual shrug.

In the end, it only took half an hour to load the dishwasher and hand-wash everything that didn’t fit. When we’d finished eating, Shadi insisted on cleaning the entire house. All I really wanted to do was lie on the couch, eating a pile of potato chips off my chest and watching reality TV, but it turned out she was right. Cleaning was a much better distraction.

For once, I didn’t think about Dad’s lies or Sonya approaching me at the funeral. I didn’t replay tidbits of my fight in the car with Mom or picture the pretty, apologetic smile on Naomi’s full lips. I didn’t worry about the book, or what Anya would think, or what Sandy would do. I didn’t really think at all.

Deep cleaning put me into a trance; I wished I could stay in an emotional cryogenic chamber that would allow me to sleep through the worst of whatever heartbreak I was avoiding.

The first phone call from Gus had come at about eleven, and I didn’t answer. There wasn’t another for twenty minutes, and when that one finally came in, making my heart knot up into my throat, he left no voice mail and sent no follow-up texts.

I turned my phone off and stuck it in the dresser drawer in my bedroom, then went back to mopping the bathroom. Shadi and I decided not to talk about it, about SEG or the Haunted Hat or anything else, until we’d finished with our work, which seemed like a good policy, since the cleaning was helping to numb me, and any time my brain even gestured toward a thought about Gus, the numbness started to unravel from my middle.

At six, Shadi determined we were done and banished me to the shower while she started on dinner. She made ratatouille, which she’d apparently been craving ever since she watched the movie Ratatouille with Ricky’s little sisters during Fourth of July weekend.

“You can tell me about him,” I promised, as we sat on either side of the table, my back turned to the window into Gus’s house, despite the fact that it and its blinds were both closed. “I still want to hear about you being happy.”

“After dinner,” Shadi said. And again, she was right. It turned out I needed this, another meal, comprised mostly of vegetables, with nothing but comfortable small talk. Things we’d seen our old classmates post online, books she’d been reading, shows I’d been watching (only Veronica Mars).

After dinner, the sky clouded over, and as I was washing our plates and silverware and Shadi was making us Sazeracs, it began to rain heartily, claps of distant thunder quivering through the house like mini earthquakes. When I’d dried the serving dish and put it away in the cupboard to the right of the oven, she handed me my glass and we went to the couch I’d spent my first night on and curled up in opposite corners, our feet tucked under a blanket together.

“Now,” she said. “Start at the beginning.”